


A Twinge in an Old Wound

by greerwatson



Category: Forever Knight
Genre: Backstory, Canon Related, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-05
Updated: 2014-08-05
Packaged: 2018-02-11 22:04:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2084799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greerwatson/pseuds/greerwatson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Nick is blown up by the pipe bomb, Janette believes he is dead.  And that means there are things she must do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Twinge in an Old Wound

**Author's Note:**

  * For [batdina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/batdina/gifts).



> 1\. The events (and some of the dialogue) in this story are based on the flashback in the episode "Only the Lonely".
> 
> 2\. This story was beta'd by [vorpalblades](http://archiveofourown.org/users/vorpalblades/pseuds/vorpalblades) (for canon consistency) and [fawatson](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/pseuds/fawatson) (for basic editing).

She knew he was in Toronto. She could sense his proximity, in that dim deep bond of blood. Still, weeks passed; and he did not come to see her.

He did not come to see her, though she _knew_ he had to have her direction, as she had his. Not to mention the obvious point that the Raven was famous in the community, known not only to all who lived in or near Toronto but also to anyone who visited, or planned to visit, or even thought of perhaps maybe someday passing through. Toronto was, after all, one of the largest cities in North America: sooner or later most people passed through. Nicolas _had_ to have heard of the Raven.

So, as he did not come to see her, it had to be deliberate.

Janette knew this, with an unacknowledged feeling of outrage. Presumably, he was visiting on _her_ , who had been his friend and lover, whatever anger he was currently feeling towards Lacroix. That Nicolas was angry at Lacroix was almost a given. He had, obviously, moved on again—doubtless in yet another futile attempt to flee their master’s influence. At any rate, the two men had not come to Toronto together. She knew that to be true, for she would have sensed if they had; and she did not. Nicolas was here; but Lacroix was not. Yet.

If Nicolas did not want to see her, then—as his friend and lover—she would respect his wish. She did not _want_ to respect it, of course: she wanted to fly to his side, and give him a healthy hug and nibble, and learn the details of the past decade and share her own. However, she knew too well that there was no point in pressing Nicolas when he wanted solitude.

It would be best to let him brood it out. Sooner or later he would come to see her. He always did. 

 

She was in the Raven, pouring a glass of house red for a visitor, when the pain struck.

It would have doubled her over in agony if it had been her own; but it came through her link with Nicolas—the link that was, for the most part, so faint and familiar that she only noticed it when it shifted, or she made a point of paying attention. Now, though, the link seared her.

Schooled well for centuries in the need to hide herself, she continued to pour. Only the briefest jerk of her hand splashed the smallest of puddles on the bar. She smiled through the echoes of pain, keeping her eyes dark and dead—and her fangs retracted, though they ached to drop.

“Everything all right?” The words were low and neutral; but the patron’s eyes narrowed with vampire caution.

“Just a twinge in an old wound,” she replied.

The other nodded, knowing the code behind the phrase. “I’m sorry,” she said, with an impersonal sympathy: all of their kind knew, sooner or later, the pang of loss. No one, after all, is truly immortal.

What happened? thought Janette as she excused herself, called Miklos from his break to take over the bar, and disappeared to the privacy of her office. _What happened?_ All she knew for certain was that, despite their bonds of antipathy, Lacroix could not finally, fatally, have lost his temper and killed his wayward son. This she knew, with the certainty of bloodline: it had not, could not, have been their master because Nicolas had died in Toronto, and Lacroix was elsewhere. Which was just as well, for, if he had been the killer, the same pain must still have seared _him_ as much as her, with guilt to boot; and Janette had no wish to feel the added pain of her master’s walking into the sun come dawn.

Instead, she expected to feel him flying towards Toronto set on vengeance: probably not tonight— (Her eyes flashed to the clock.) —but before tomorrow night’s dawn, certainly.

She hesitated. What should she do? There was, after all, the club. But who, in these circumstances, could feel up to coping with clients? (She wanted to flee to the sky, chasing the sunset round the globe until she fell exhausted below the waves into the darkest depths, where her heart lay.) She needed to find out what had happened.

She set in her heart the last direction she had felt from Nicolas, a vector that led to the east, but slightly north. Leaving the club by the back alley door, she took to the dark sky where no mortal would see her. As she followed the trace, she could hear sirens tracking the same way. Looking ahead, she saw the shared locus of their convergence: a small strip mall, a mere half a dozen stores with a few parking spaces in front: the typical local stores of a midtown residential neighbourhood. She hovered, peering, making out details: a hairdresser, a bakery, a chain restaurant, a gifte shoppe … a corner store. On fire, with the front window blown out, jagged glass in the corners, and glinting shards sprayed across the asphalt.

There was an ambulance, and a body attended by kneeling figures. Nicolas? She cursed herself for delaying: if she had arrived first, she could have carried him away, left his body exposed upon the roof of the Raven to catch the sun—or buried him, as he might have preferred (even in the stinging soil of a consecrated cemetery, she would have …for him).

A fire engine honked up the street, cut to the curb, and disgorged coated, helmeted forms that set urgently to work. A squad car squealed round the bend and parked, siren cut, its occupants emerging with guns and notebooks at the ready.

Prudently, Janette retreated a bit higher.

Shortly, the ambulance departed with its load; and she followed, for the further activity below her was human business and of no immediate concern. Police might tape off the site and question witnesses; firefighters might clear neighbours from their houses, hitch hoses to hydrants, and battle the blaze: _her_ concern was the proper disposition of the corpse of a vampire.

She tracked the ambulance by sight and siren until its destination became obvious, and then whisked ahead to an alley a block away, where she could land unseen. This meant, though, that she had to walk, so innocently, through the entrance to the Emergency Department. As a result, the stretcher had been unloaded and wheeled in by the time she entered the outer room. There were a dozen or more people waiting, patients and their families, as well as the receptionist and triage nurse. Double doors swung at the end; and she caught a glimpse of the hall beyond. Injured as Nicolas had been, he would have been taken inside immediately.

She moved to follow, and was intercepted. But that was easy: she fixed the nurse with a wide blue stare, forced rapport with the strength of urgency, and informed the woman that she had been told to go straight in. There, she found a doctor bending over the body, listening with his stethoscope, shaking his head.

“Hardly worth bringing him in,” she heard.

“We thought, once, we heard a beat. Then we lost it, but….”

“As well to be sure,” agreed the doctor, “but the poor devil hadn’t a chance. You’d better take him down to the morgue: they’ll call the coroner’s office.”

Janette hesitated before crossing the huge busy, crowded room, with its doctors and nurses and patients, any or all of whom might see and stop her. Then she traced deeper into the building, following the route that the paramedics had taken with their burden. The delay put her far enough behind for them not to notice her; but it also meant that she failed to anticipate their sudden turn. Then three people walked straight out into the hall, requiring her to sidestep; and she realized that there was a bank of elevators, and that she had missed the opportunity to get into the same car.

Still, three people had left the elevator…. She sped to catch them before they could enter the busy Emergency Department, forced a locked door, and took them into a side room for questioning. Unfortunately, they were merely a patient with a sprained arm and a pair of accompanying friends who had arrived at the hospital by public transit and come in the wrong entrance. Fortunately (for them), she was old enough to control her annoyance.

She emerged to the Emerge, snagged an orderly who was clearing an examination room, and finally got directions. Even then, though, she had to disentangle the coloured lines marking the route, make sense of the designations of the various hospital wings, and track round and round the room numbers until she found the hospital morgue. Inside were four interns practising their sutures under the supervision of a resident too bored not to welcome a distraction. She drew him out to the hall and encouraged him to talk. By this time, she had been delayed so often that she was almost expecting his answer: “the usual guy” from the coroner’s office had already picked up the body.

She flew. 

 

The Coroner Building was another warren of corridors. It took Janette only minutes to realize this; and, after her experience at the hospital, she dared not simply fly round the building blindly searching for the correct room: the halls were not _that_ wide; and anyone might spot her from some unsuspected cross-corridor. So she shut her eyes, the better to focus.

And then she felt…?

So faint, it must be wishful imagination. And then she thought: no, it’s Lacroix; it must be: he has arrived already. (But it did not _feel_ like Lacroix.)

It felt like Nick.

Our kind are strong, she thought with hope. He must have been deeply, desperately injured for me to feel such pain from him—and then such silence—but he _is_ here. He is _here_! She closed her outer senses, and tuned to that faint familiar trace. Then she set the direction in her mind and let herself be drawn to the lodestone of her heart. As she walked, the feeling strengthened sharply: the lingering dregs of life had, she supposed, built back to some critical level; and his healing now accelerated.

 _“At least there's not much of a face to look at,”_ she heard. She rounded the corridor, almost running into a white-coated man hurrying from an office. He turned in surprise, and opened his mouth to speak; but she caught his eye easily, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him—stricken, silent, staring—until they were two turns away and could talk safely.

He was, as she surmised, the “usual guy”; and a very ordinary “usual” indeed, to her eyes: not overly tall, rather less than handsome, not particularly bright or intuitive. Easy to handle, too: no resistor this!

“He was trying to stop a robbery,” the man nattered. “A gang, someone at the scene said. They tossed a pipe bomb, and he—I dunno—tried to run out of the store with it, or threw himself on it, or something like that. Something heroic.”

Yes, Janette thought. That’s my Nicolas, the fool: sacrificing immortality to save the soon-to-be-dead from dying “before their time”.

She stripped the man of all he knew; but it was second- … no, _third_ -hand knowledge: passed from the paramedics to the attendant at the morgue, and only then to this “Eddie”. Gossip, no more.

She blanked his memory and let him go his way. By the time she retraced her route to the hall outside the office, she could hear Nicolas—alive, at least, if not quite fully recovered from his injuries. She also heard a woman’s voice, and no screams; so presumably he did once more have a face. Certainly, he had his tongue.

 _“Who are you?”_ she heard.

 _“You don't need to know.”_ (Ah, Nicolas, for once you use your head.) She could hear the sounds of steps and a cupboard door being opened; then there came a whiff of blood. (What is going on in there?)

 _“_ What _are you?”_ (Don’t answer!)

 _“Something very different from you.”_ (Careful!) _“I am a vampire.”_

 _“Vampire?”_ Lighter steps. _“Oh...you're so cold.”_

 _“I'm dead.”_ (No, you fool. No, you’re not. You’re not dead.)

The echo of her thoughts came back; and, to her surprise, Janette realized the words had been spoken by the woman talking to Nicolas. Truth, yet from the lips of a mortal.

Nicolas could not be permitted to betray himself. Janette was about to interrupt the tête-à-tête when she realized that, astonishingly, he had decided this himself. For once, he would hold to the code.

His voice deepened to the rich, vibrant tones of vampire hypnosis. _“Listen to me.”_

 _“I’m listening.”_ The woman’s voice was too crisp, too conscious, even though Janette knew that, inside the room, he would be staring deeper into her eyes.

 _“Listen to me: you did not receive a body tonight to autopsy: there was no body blown up; no body returned to life; there was no vampire.”_ His voice was measured, as well as deep. Janette could sense that he had now established the necessary rapport. _“There are no vampires.”_ Inside, she could hear the slowed sound of the woman’s heartbeat. She must be deeply under.

Nicolas’s footsteps—so unmistakeable—crossed the room. He paused to do … something or other … then moved on again. Janette pushed the door open and went in.

He stood in the centre of the room by a low metal gurney. In his hands was a large and bloody bag, which he was carefully folding. He looked awful. Janette had seen him in many guises, but near-corpse was not one of them; and the sight shocked her. His limbs were intact, at least now. But his clothes were not; and the stains and rents made clear how close he had truly come to death. Their appearance suggested that the man Eddie in the hall had not been wrong in his summary of events: Nicolas _looked_ like the survivor of an explosion. It was not merely the torn fabric: dirt caked his face and clothes. With a pang, she saw how far he had altered from the debonair, stylish, ever-youthful figure of her memory. This man bore his youth hard; his clothes—between the tears—were coarse and badly cut; and his hair was in need of a comb, if not a pair of shears.

He turned and saw her, with surprise. (Surely he must have known she was there?) Still, he did not question her presence.

Janette looked around the office. Facing a large metal cabinet stood the woman whom Nicolas had hypnotized. She wore a white coat: a doctor, perhaps; or some sort of nurse or laboratory assistant. Even when Janette looked directly her way; she did not move or speak, nor indicate in any way that she was aware that someone had entered. With the leisure to inspect her, Janette realized that the woman was fairly young and certainly lovely. Just the sort to appeal to Nicolas, in fact—which would (quite aside from his current scruples) quite adequately explain why he had left her alive. He had always been susceptible to a pretty face.

“You were hurt,” Janette said, turning back to Nicolas. “Badly: I felt you across town, even in the Raven. It was … not pleasant. I do wish you would be more careful.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He stared at her, almost hungrily; but then he said, “You should not have come, Janette.”

“How could I not?”

He hesitated, and then said simply, “We have not met. You understand? Here in Toronto, we have not met.” His tone held an unwonted chill.

Something to do with Lacroix? she wondered. She waited; but he did not elaborate, nor explain or apologize for his failure to seek her at the Raven.

“You know where to find me,” she finally said. After a long moment of further silence, she left awkwardly—she who was never awkward. She fumed; but she said nothing. That was their master’s way, to argue and command. After so many centuries, she had long since come to think it remarkably foolish that he had never managed to realize that it only aggravated Nicolas’s recalcitrance.

She could wait. Her old friend, her lover, he would come to her. She knew he would—sooner or later, some time before he moved on once again. He always did.

She did not return to the Raven. She waited, just outside the building, until Nicolas finally came out. He must have known she was still there; but he took to the air without stopping to speak. She watched him fly eastwards towards the direction in which she usually felt him: he must be heading home.

When she was sure that he had gone, she went back inside.

This time, she felt less urgency, and took note of the name plate outside the door: Lambert, it would seem: Natalie Lambert. And her own office, not shared. The door was not locked; and Janette entered without knocking, and took a quiet step down the short entrance. Dr. Lambert was seated behind a desk, ruffling through some paperwork. Beside the steel table in the centre of the room, the gurney was no longer stained; nor was there any sign of the large folded-up bag. Clearly, Nicolas had done a reasonable job of tidying up. Janette nevertheless looked around to see if any trace might have been missed.

“Can I help you?”

“Ah—” Janette’s eyes flew to the desk. “Dr. Lambert?”

“Yes.” The woman got up. “You wanted to see me?”

“I was just passing and saw the open door.” Janette smiled, thinking furiously. “I’m new here? Work upstairs.” She pointed vaguely ceilingwards. “It’s so quiet at this time of night. I was just taking a break, thought I’d have a look round, get the layout of the building. You know?”

Dr. Lambert broke into a welcoming smile. She stepped forward, holding out her hand, which Janette perforce had to shake.

“Sure! Well, down here we have the morgue, the pathology labs, _my_ office—obviously!—and those of the other pathologists who work here. I’m on night shift at the moment. Low rat on the totem pole, if you get my meaning. So … are you working for Gleason’s section on Two?”

“No,” said Janette prudently. “I’m on the sixth floor, if I’m counting right.” (The building had clearly had at least six floors, so this seemed safe.)

“Well, I doubt if you’ll be venturing down here in the usual way of things,” said Dr. Lambert cheerfully. “Most people, unless they’re path. lab. types, tend to shun us a bit. Corpses aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.”

“Indeed,” said Janette. She thought it safe to look around the room fairly closely: it would be in character. She prowled along a lab desk, which was clean and clear, except for some equipment; and spent a moment’s glance for an X-ray pinned up on a lighted board. She was familiar enough with anatomy to see that it showed a woman’s skeleton.

“Had a busy night?” she asked, not idly at all.

“Dead quiet,” was the cheerful response.

Clearly, this was morgue humour. Janette duly turned, with a smile and a little laugh. She drifted closer to the desk, wanting to take a look at the papers.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Dr. Lambert asked. She waved towards a filing cabinet behind the desk; there was a coffee maker perched on top.

“Why, thank you, Dr. Lambert,” she replied, keeping her reservations from her voice.

“Oh, call me Natalie!”

The woman fetched the coffee maker down and went to the sink for water, giving Janette the opportunity for a glance at the desk top. From the date on the top of the page, Dr. Lambert had been looking at an old case. Nothing to do with Nick, then: just paperwork being finished … as one might on a “dead quiet” night.

“So, you’re new. When’d you start?”

Dr. Lam—“Natalie”’s back was still turned: she was filling the pot.

“Oh, last week.”

“You’ll find this a pretty friendly place,” said Natalie, returning with the pot, putting it in place on the machine, and opening the cabinet to fetch out a packet of coffee. “There’s a lunch room on the fourth floor; I expect you’ve found it already.”

She tore open the packet, and the rich smell of its contents spread outwards. Janette swallowed hard: alcohol she could tolerate; but this was pungent.

“Oh, my!” she exclaimed, feigning to look at the clock on the wall. “Is that the time?”

Natalie turned from plugging in the percolator.

“I’d better be getting back before they miss me,” Janette said quickly. “My break’s been over for five minutes.”

Natalie grinned. “Oh, they won’t send out a search party until you’re at least a half hour overdue, not at this time of night.”

“Even so,” said Janette. She debated placing her own hypnosis on the woman; but decided against it. A chance meeting with a new hire would be forgotten soon enough; and there was no point in risking some interference with Nicolas’s mindwork.

“Well, we may run into each other in the lunch room sometime,” said Natalie, with a friendly smile. “Though, mind you, there’s not much you can buy at this hour.”

“Sure, see you,” said Janette, adding “Toodle-oo,” as she left. She risked a backward glance, and saw the woman take down a single mug from the filing cabinet. The coffee would evidently not go to waste. 

 

Janette debated returning to the club, but knew that there was more she ought to do. So she hovered, once again, above the crime scene. The fire was out: the quick response of the fire fighters had meant that it had not spread to nearby buildings. Indeed, the upper portion of the store was largely untouched, though the shop itself was blackened and drowned. Crime-scene tape was not yet up: the fire fighters still inspected for hot spots. Witnesses were, however, already being questioned. Both uniformed and plainclothes police were speaking with anyone who had been in the store at the time, as well as those outside, neighbours, and passers-by.

The shards of glass still glinted on the ground. Someone, at some point, would presumably be delegated to sweep them up; but for now, Janette supposed, the scene would be left intact—or as intact as it could be, given the confusion.

Secure in her altitude, she tuned her hearing to the scene below.

 _“No, you can’t open in the morning,”_ she heard. _“Not only are there fire fighters all over the building, it’s a crime scene. We’re not releasing it until Ident has gone over the place with a fine-tooth comb, and maybe not then._ None _of the stores here is going to be opening tomorrow.”_

The speaker wore police uniform; she spoke to a man whose pose screamed frustrated anger.

 _“I suggest you talk to your insurance agent,”_ she heard the cop add.

With a stifled, _“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,”_ the man turned on his heel and stalked off to a car parked down the street. Even before he had got in and driven off, Janette had shifted her attention elsewhere.

_“…down to the station to look through some pictures.”_

The words, from a man in a suit, caught her attention. Pictures of whom? Nicolas? Ignoring the risk of her movement catching the eye, Janette dropped a good ten feet. This could be important.

_“I saw nothing.”_

_“Well, that’s not what the customers in the store say. You were behind the counter.”_

_“I was not looking.”_

_“At three guys shaking you down? _”__

_“It was a robbery.”_

_“Well, we can talk about_ that _down at the station, too. _”__

This was more promising. Like the detective, Janette dismissed the possibility that the man knew nothing. If he was the shopkeeper—or at least an employee—and had been at the cash register, then he would surely know what had happened in the store.

Below her, the detective led the protesting man to a waiting car, put him in the back, and drove off. Silently, Janette followed. The car below, with its mag-mount beacon on the roof, was easy to track through the night streets. It turned, finally, into a parking lot; passed a group of blue-and-white squad cars; and pulled into an empty space not far from a side door into a large, official-looking building that Janette took to be “the station”. She hovered until she was sure the men were entering, alighted in the shadows, and followed them in. Quiet in the background, she listened for their heartbeats, scented their passage, and tracked them to one of the interrogation rooms. There was an adjoining room for observation: pleased, she thought it was just like a television cop show.

She slipped inside. A light hypnosis on the one man watching gave her licence to remain. The detective inside the other room repeated his name for the record: Kennedy, apparently. Then he began to ask some fairly routine background questions. A few minutes into the interrogation, a second plainclothes officer joined the first: they seemed on familiar terms; so Janette assumed this to be his partner. Detective Thompson, he called himself. She settled in patiently to find out what they might learn.

The man under interrogation—Pankin was his name—had, indeed, been working the cash. He was also the owner of the store, as Janette had surmised. From such a vantage point, he _must_ have seen all, heard all.

He admitted … nothing.

“Look,” Detective Kennedy said, his voice clear, if a little tinny through the speaker, “we know the Russians are running a shake-down operation in your area.”

“No, you hear the people who were there; they say robbery,” Pankin persisted.

“Yeah, right. Who brings a pipe bomb to a robbery? Please! Don’t take us for fools.”

“Your customers,” said Thompson, “they mostly live in the neighbourhood. They come in now and then—to get cigarettes, milk, that sort of thing. _You_ , on the other hand, are in the store most of the time it’s open. You deal with suppliers, you take deliveries, you _know_ what’s going on. You’d go broke if you didn’t.”

But what has this to do with Nicolas, thought Janette. Ask him about Nicolas, she urged mentally. Get _on_ with it!

“We can talk to the other store owners, you know,” warned Kennedy. “Someone’s going to talk. Or is it just the Russian community they’re going after?”

“I don’t know what you mean. Who are you talking about?”

“The men in the store.”

“The ones with the bomb.”

“Is it a protection racket?”

Pankin merely shrugged.

“Well,” said Kennedy, leaning back in his chair. “Then let’s talk about the bomb. Or are you going to say you don’t know anything about _that_? You’re not going to pretend there wasn’t a _bomb_ , are you?”

This stung Pankin. “Of course, there was a bomb. That is why I need to call the insurance man, and get my store fixed.”

Janette could have sighed with impatience. She could—she _knew_ she could—learn everything from the man in only a few minutes. But, here in the police station, there were too many people. Even in the interrogation room with Pankin, there was a policeman by the door as well as the detectives. Perhaps Lacroix could have held so many in thrall; but she knew her limitations.

“The men with the bomb—”

“Customers, I thought when they came in.”

To Janette’s relief, the detectives appeared to accept this, at least for now—though eventually, she supposed, they would badger Pankin again about Russian racketeers.

“When did they pull out the bomb?”

“When the man came up and tried to talk to them.”

“That’s the man who got killed?”

Janette stiffened to attention. Through the one-way glass, she could see Pankin nod.

“I never saw him before.” From his unchanging heartbeat, Janette could tell that Pankin was speaking the truth.

“He never gave his name?”

“Why would he?”

“A credit card?”

“No, no, you don’t understand.” Pankin leaned forward earnestly, willing to speak now, on a subject that was safe. “He just came in, like anyone else … went down the aisle, looked at shelves. Then the men came in to hold me up, to get money.”

For a moment, Janette thought the detectives would interrupt, insisting once again that it had been no robbery. But they remained silent:  Pankin had begun to talk; and with the dam burst, there was no telling what he would say.

“He came so fast I didn’t see him.  Or well,” Pankin hesitated, “of course, I wasn’t looking at him.  Well, I _wasn’t_ ,” he protested, though the detectives had said nothing.  “I was looking at the men, and the guns.”

“They had guns?” Kennedy broke silence.

“Not pulled out; but, yes, they had guns.”

Thompson nodded.

“So then he tried to talk to one of them; but another pushed him back, and told him to stay out of it. Then he turned on that one, and he pulled out his gun—”

“The victim had a gun?”

“The _robber_ had a gun. But he didn’t shoot. He just pointed it. Then the guy grabbed at it.”

This startled both detectives..

“Yes, he did,” said Pankin, clearly again anticipating denial. “He grabbed at it, wrenched it right out of the man’s hand. I saw the look on the robber’s face. He was terrified.”

Ah, thought Janette. The sight of the vampire throws fear into the heart of the mortal.

“That was when the one at the back pulled out the pipe bomb. He held it over his head,” said Pankin, “and flicked his Bic. It was a _thing_ , just a _thing_. I didn’t know it was a bomb. But I caught the sound, the click. And then he threw it, right at the counter; and all the robbers ran. And the guy caught it somehow, and he tried—I think he tried— Oh, God, it all happened so fast!”

He broke down, shuddering at the memory. The detectives looked at one another, and then sat back. “Struthers,” Thompson said to the uniformed cop in the corner. “Would you go get us some coffee?”

The man nodded, and left.

“Yeah, it happened fast,” Thompson said gently to Pankin. “We know that. It’s hard to remember all the details. But you’re doing fine.”

“Go through it again for us,” said Kennedy.

Pankin put his hand to his forehead and groaned. “Oh, do I have to. It’s so horrible.”

“I believe you,” said Thompson, sincerely. He had seen the body.

“Like he threw himself on a grenade, you know?”

Kennedy reached into his pocket and handed over a Kleenex. “If you need it,” he said. “Why don’t you go back to when the guy came up to the counter and tried to talk to one of the … ‘robbers’. What did he say?”

Pankin looked up. “Oh, just … something like, ‘Look at me. You don’t want to do this.’ It didn’t make much sense, saying that to a gang of guys with guns.”

The detectives nodded sympathetically. Clearly, it made no sense to them, either. On the other side of the glass, though, Janette felt a tear trace redly down her cheek. It made sense to her. He tried to hypnotize them, she thought. How just _like_ Nicolas, even though there were three of them.

It was a couple of hours later before they let Pankin take a rest; and, by then, Janette was worried that she would have to spend the day at the police station. The sun was close to rising. Surely, the mortals must be tired? Pankin, especially: he, after all, was not on night shift. Briefly, the detectives did allow him a break. Still, after a sandwich and a phone call to his wife, the interrogation continued. Then there was a knock at the door: the police artist had arrived.

There was a brief delay for introductions, explanations, directions, and setting up. Then the woman set to work, questioning Pankin and adding details, which she altered and switched in accordance with his comments.

After a quarter hour or so, Thompson got up and stretched, and said, “This is going to take some time, Jack.” The men’s eyes met.

“Why don’t we leave you to it?” suggested the other detective to the artist. He went and stood in the open doorway. “Come on, Morris. It’s not as though we don’t have things we can do.”

Thompson hesitated, and then nodded. “Stay with them,” he instructed Struthers; “and come get us when the sketch is done. We’ll be in the squad room.”

Janette was torn. Should she follow, to see what they would do and whether they found anything significant? Or should she stay and see how close the sketch artist came to depicting a recognizable image of Nicolas? It was a dilemma.

It was also boring, watching and listening as minute alterations were made to the sketch. The detective sharing the observation room must have felt the same way. Suddenly, he left—without a backward glance, clearly still under her suggestion not to notice her presence. This gave her, though, an opportunity that she had not expected. Quietly, she slipped next door, knocked gently, and, when Officer Struthers opened the door, looked him straight in the eye. A moment (and a carefully worded suggestion) later, and he stood quietly unseeing in the corner.

Her entrance hardly bothered the others in the room. The artist, assuming her to be another detective, barely spared her a glance; and Pankin—after looking at her—was recalled to the task at hand.

She moved behind the artist, looking over her shoulder as the sketch refined its shape. Regrettably, the woman seemed skilled at her job. If not precisely Nicolas, it was certainly the head of a fair-haired man with similar features.

Janette thought over her knowledge of police procedure. It might be culled from popular media; but she thought that, in the essentials, she understood what the sketch was for. The picture would be duplicated a hundred times and more. It would be passed to uniformed officers in their blue-and-white squad cars, printed in newspapers, and shown on the television news. Have you seen this man? Do you know his name?

It could not be allowed. “Mr. Pankin,” she insinuated, slow and low, with the force of her powers, and caught his eye. “Pay attention to me.” The phrase was, as intended, sufficiently innocuous not to draw the suspicion of either the artist nor the man, nor disturb Officer Struthers, to whom she could not pay any more personal attention than she had already.

When several seconds passed without her saying more, the artist turned to look up at her inquiringly; and so Janette trapped her eyes, too. 

 

Leaving them to their work, Janette went in search of the detectives’ squad room. This was down a long corridor: a large room filled with pairs of desks, though a number were empty. She had no difficulty, therefore, in spotting one of the two men she wanted. She hung back uncertainly on the other side of the room, and then—with sudden inspiration—took a bold seat on a chair near one of the empty desks, as though she were simply waiting for someone who had just gone out of the room for a minute.

To make herself inconspicuous, she stared blankly at a nearby window veiled with Venetian blinds, as someone waiting might do. Through the half-shut slats she could see little more than stripes of darkness, slashed with dusty white. It was easy to feign the bored expression of a waiting mortal. Across the room, Morris Thompson was on the telephone.

“… not finished? Well, at least I caught you when you weren’t gowned and veiled.” He laughed.

A call to his wife? Janette looked around for his partner—what was his name? Jack Kennedy, that was it. He was nowhere to be seen; and she tuned her hearing to his heartbeat.

Ah! He was in that office in the far corner.

 _“… sure it_ is _some sort of protection racket, Captain. Well, the customers don’t say so; but then there’s no reason they’d know the situation. Anyway, only a couple of people were in the store at that time of night; and, once they saw the gang, they both kept their heads down on the far side behind the shelves, hoping not to be spotted.”_

A report of some sort? Ah, to their superior officer, of course: that would be “Captain”.

Confusingly, she could still hear Thompson: _“Come on, get your mind on the ball: it was picked up and dropped off. I spoke to you earlier on the phone, you know: you said it had just arrived and you’d be getting right to work on it.”_

(Whatever _that_ was about.)

And back to the office: _“Okay, Kennedy. It’s early days, but clearly you have a lead—at least on the attackers. Follow it up: see if those customers can recognize anyone from mug shots. And, face or no face, get that guy identified!”_

Now _that_ was certainly a reference to Nicolas. It was just as Janette had thought: from the perspective of the police, identifying him was a matter of urgency. So … she had done right to down everything, leave the Raven to her staff, and head out into the night. Janette mentally patted herself on the back. Even though Nicolas had proved to be alive, he was in no fit shape to deal with the matter himself. For once, it was she who had saved the day, she thought with satisfaction. Lacroix could rest easy.

_“Yes, that’s right: you’ve got it now: the bombing victim. Geez Louise, you guys must have been busy tonight!”_

Her attention was briefly caught by the conversation on the phone. Who was Detective Thompson talking to?

 _“Well, I’ll leave you to get to it, I guess. Give me a call when you’re done. _”__  He hung up.

Some witness, perhaps, she thought. Or the uniformed officers she had seen at the shopping centre; or maybe someone from the Fire Service. Anyway, she could not go over, hypnotize him, and ask: the office door opened, and Kennedy came out. He was followed by a tall, burly man in a loose grey three-piece suit, jacket unbuttoned. He stood in the corridor between desks, one hand slipped casually into a pocket, and surveyed the room. “Captain”, obviously.

“You’ll be working some overtime on this, I reckon,” he said genially; but, underneath the good nature and smile, his tone was firm.

“Looks it,” said Detective Thompson. “We’ve got those witness reports to go through.”

“What did you hear from the lab?”

“Ident’s at the scene,” said Detective Kennedy.

“Won’t get a Path. Report till tomorrow at the earliest,” said Thompson. “Some backlog, I think.”

“Door to door is still going on,” added Kennedy.

“Right. Well, you two’d better get out there.” With a decisive nod, the Captain turned to fix the room with a sharp glance, and then disappeared back into his office.

The two detectives shared a glance of their own. “I’ll check on that sketch,” said Kennedy, “since I’m on my feet.” He walked past the desk where Janette sat, ignoring her completely, and went up the hall towards the interrogation room. Behind him, Thompson picked up the phone again. Janette let her eyes wander past him to the outer door of the squad room and the large window beside it, through which she could see people in some reception area.

This was starting to get boring, and time was getting—she glanced up at the clock—late, indeed. She could feel the quickening of the sun as it neared the horizon.

There were footsteps in the hall behind her. She did not look round: it was Kennedy’s heartbeat, and Pankin’s; and the third one would belong to the sketch artist. They passed her; and she saw Thompson look up alertly.

“I don’t think you’re going to be happy,” Kennedy began, calling loud enough for his partner to hear across the room.

Janette stifled a smile. With another glance at the clock, she rose and made her way out of the door, past the reception desk where the sergeant sat, down the entrance hall, and out into the greying light of pre-dawn. It was too bright for her to take straight to the sky without being seen; and she walked down the broad street until she could take a turn into an empty driveway and whisk herself aloft.

She made it to the Raven with bare minutes to spare, glad that the 27th Precinct was at least downtown, and she had not found herself stranded in some outer suburb. The club was, of course, empty of patrons: those who were not resident had long since gone home; those transients who had accepted the hospitality of the house had turned in downstairs. She felt wrung out: by the echoes of Nicolas’s injury, and her efforts on his behalf. It had been a hard night’s work.

She wanted to turn in herself: go up to her apartment above the club, to her elegant bedroom with its silken sheets and velvet drapes, where steel shutters kept out even the slightest trace of sunlight: where she could sleep in safety, troubled only by her dreams. Instead, she went to her office. Her answering machine told her of repeated calls, all from the same number.

She dialed it.

“Yes, he _is_ alive,” she said. “I, too, felt it; and his injuries must have been severe. However, he is well recovered by now. Yes, I saw him myself; but he did not want to talk to me. I do not know why he is here—” Before the man at the other end could break in, she added, “—and I do not ask. It is not my business, at least until he chooses to come to me and talk about it.”

And then, for a while, she had to listen.

“Well, you know _my_ advice,” she said finally, “if you were to ask for it, anyway. Come if you wish, of course. You will, if you feel you have to see him for yourself. But, if you take my word for it that he is recovered (and your own blood bond should tell you _that_ ), then I promise that I shall keep an eye on him. For my own sake. But I shall do it from afar.”

And she listened some more, before finally she hung up.

The morning newspaper—which she read that evening—gave her details of the bombing incident, most of which she knew already. It was several weeks later that her desultory “eye on him” revealed that Nicolas had joined the police force himself, and been assigned to work as a detective at the 27th Precinct. For a while, she thought this some foresighted precaution of his. Perhaps it was, at first, but he stayed at the job; and, in the end, she decided he was pursuing one of his mortal vocations again.

It was much later that she realized he kept contact with Natalie Lambert; and even later before she met the woman once again. She did not recognize Janette; but then, why should she?

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The two detectives in this story, as well as the owner of the store where the bombing occurred, have names taken from my earlier story, ["The New Guy"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/231501). If you wish, you can take "A Twinge in an Old Wound" to fit in the same continuity.
> 
> 2\. The police captain in this story is, of course, Joe Stonetree. The uniformed officer who is in the interrogation room is also a canonical character: Officer Will Struthers appeared in the episode "Hunters", where he is supposed to guard Schanke in a safe house and winds up being murdered himself.


End file.
